The Case for Elizabeth Warren — She’s No Hillary

December 12, 2014

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“Stop Hillary!” was the headline of the cover story in the November issue of Harper’s Magazine. In this clip, John R. MacArthur, president and publisher of Harper’s, says that he hopes a number of progressive politicians, including Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), will challenge Clinton and also run for president in 2016.

“There are a lot of people who would make good candidates, but they’re intimidated by the Clinton fundraising machine,” MacArthur tells Moyers.

BILL MOYERS:
That was a bold cover story you had recently: “Stop Hillary.”

JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
Yeah, well, we were, it was our effort to force a debate. And we did. I’m actually quite pleased with the outcome that all our competitors were then forced to do cover stories and commentaries on other candidates who might come into the race: Elizabeth Warren, Jim Webb has already announced an exploratory committee, Bernie Sanders, I wish that Sherrod Brown from Ohio would run. There are a lot of people who would make good candidates, but they’re intimidated by the Clinton fundraising machine.

BILL MOYERS:
But would she raise a big tent for a lot of Democrats to get under and reverse the Republican wave of the midterm elections?

JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
There’s absolutely no room, there’s no tent that can hold the working class, the poor, the lower class that I’m talking about, and the Steven Rattners of Wall Street, who go around saying, oh, don’t you love us? We’re social liberals. We’re for civil rights. We’re for all the rights that you care about. We’re for tolerance, and so on and so forth.

But what they’re not for is worker rights. It doesn’t matter if you’re gay or black or an impoverished white former factory worker. You all have worker rights in common. That’s the commonality. Citizens’ rights, I would say also, but worker rights. They never talk about worker rights. They just talk about cultural liberalism. That’s what they’re interested in.

BILL MOYERS:
Here’s a quote from Steven Rattner, whom you mentioned. It has to do with the Obama nomination of Antonio Weiss, prominent investment banker who worked on the auto industry bailout during Obama’s first term, as Steven Rattner did.

This whole thing, this opposition by Elizabeth Warren and others to Antonio Weiss, “is part of a much broader narrative of the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party and whether so-called progressives are going to capture that or whether more mainstream Democrats, who are equally progressive in their own way, are going to retain it.” He said if the Weiss nomination goes down, “it will be a long time before anyone else with Wall Street experience volunteers for this kind of job.”

JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
Boy, what a threat. Wouldn’t that be a great thing, if those people from Wall Street stopped volunteering? They don’t want to stop volunteering. But that is the central problem in the Democratic Party today. Rattner speaks for a faction, a minority of people but a majority of money.

The other people that I’m referring to, I hope it’s Elizabeth Warren or that she hangs in there, and people like Jim Webb are speaking for the majority. But the majority has much less money than this small minority of so-called social liberals on Wall Street.

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